


He Says Nothing

by Bitter_Baristas



Series: Spideypool Oneshots [13]
Category: Deadpool - All Media Types, Spider-Man - All Media Types, Spider-Man: Homecoming (2017)
Genre: Angst, Angst and Hurt/Comfort, Child Abuse, Child Neglect, Dark, Death, Depressing, Established Relationship, Family Drama, Gun Violence, Hurt/Comfort, M/M, Past Child Abuse, Past Sexual Abuse, Post-Traumatic Stress Disorder - PTSD, Sad, Sexual Abuse, Substance Abuse, Suicide, Suicide Attempt, Temporary Character Death, Wade Wilson Needs A Hug, wade wilsons parents
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2018-05-29
Updated: 2018-05-29
Packaged: 2019-05-15 07:20:05
Rating: Mature
Warnings: Graphic Depictions Of Violence, Rape/Non-Con, Underage
Chapters: 1
Words: 3,202
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/14785976
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/Bitter_Baristas/pseuds/Bitter_Baristas
Summary: Wade doesn’t know how to answer that. He hasn't learned how to speak about the things that shaped him. He doesn’t know how to talk about his dead mother, or the cold lips of a troop leaders smothering his. He doesn’t know how to say that if he had tried harder years ago, he wouldn’t be alive today.So he says nothing.





	He Says Nothing

**Author's Note:**

> Chronologically in the series this occurs after Unintentional Innuendo and before Perfect. But as always it can stand alone as a oneshot.

Wade is the result of an unhappy marriage and faulty contraception. 

His mother gives birth to him after six hours of grueling contractions, her skin slicked with sweat and her hair matted to her neck. Her husband, Thomas, is not there. Instead of holding his hand in a white knuckled grip, her fingers bunch up the antiseptic smelling sheets. She grits her teeth until her jaw aches and screams at the hospital staff to, “cut it out!” 

When she finally, finally, pushes little Wade into the world the relief she feels is because her ordeal is over, not because the doctor announces her baby is healthy. 

Hailey had not wanted kids, had not felt joy for her impending parenthood during her pregnancy. She looks at Wade and sees a strange, fleshy creature. Another burden on her shoulders. Another way for Thomas to control her. 

It takes six weeks on antidepressants for her to recognize him as her child. Her baby. She loves him more fiercely than she’s loved anything else. In her youth she had been passionate about everything, loved fast and easy. 

This love doesn’t compare. It’s unconditional, life changing. Hailey doesn’t have the words to describe how much she loves her son. It’s easier to show it, anyway. Baby books filled with photographs, letters written to him for a day far off into the future when he becomes a man. 

Wade saves her life, reignites the fire in her even though he can’t lift his own head. 

She stands over his crib everynight, the nursery bathed in the soft glow of a Mickey Mouse night light, the moon a yellow disk outside the window and gleaming against the last of winters snow. A rocket ship mobile spins lazily and Wade cooes at it, fat fists reaching for it. She watches him sleep, checks on him every time she rouses from her own slumber. Into the darkness she tells him that before him, she had never known love. 

Her own mother was a strict Christian woman who showed affection sparingly. Hailey does not follow in her mother's footsteps. She balances Wade on her hip while she cooks dinner, presses kisses to his dimpled knees and tells him sweet truths.

“You’re my baby, my baby boy. My precious little Wade.” She gushes, brushing his flaxen wisps of hair with the pads of her fingers.

Hailey, who had been a shell of a person since marrying Thomas, is vibrant with life. She throws herself into motherhood with a passion. 

Perhaps if she stuck around his entire life, Wade wouldn’t be a mercenary. Perhaps he’d be an ordinary kid who graduated high school, went to college and met someone to bring home to the folks. Maybe life would have brought him a stable sort of happiness instead of the peaking highs and steeply dropping lows he’s used to. 

But his mother dies of cancer when he’s four years old and Thomas erases her presence from the house. All the proof Hailey was a good mother, that she loved Wade with her entirety, is gone. Letters written in scrawls of cursive, dated for his eighteenth birthday, are locked away where Wade will never find them. 

He grows up with a father who resents his existence and sends him off to stay with a scout troop leader. She’s a nice lady, with long red hair that smells like strawberries. Her nails are always colorful and shiny. 

Her voice is honeyed and Wade is too young to detect the manipulation her sweetness hides. 

She presses him to her, folds him in a hug. She’s soft and warm, and Wade is starved for affection. He preens under her special attention. She ruffles his hair. His heart flutters happily. After the other kids go home, Wade stays. 

The woman lulls him into trusting her, loving her. 

Night falls rapidly outside the sliding glass door to the backyard. Her hand is a comforting weight on Wade’s shoulder and she says she’d better call his father to come pick him up. Wade doesn’t want to go home. He tells her this and her lips peel back into a smile he doesn’t see is predatory. 

She stands at the stove, cooking his favorite: spaghetti with meat sauce. Her hand, still on his shoulder, presses him close and he leans his head on her waist. 

“Wade, do you remember when you called me mom?” 

Wade stiffens, recalling the earlier embarrassment. “Yeah,” he mumbles, ashamed. 

“Don’t worry, sweetie. I really liked it. Would you like to call me mom?” 

Wade beams, nods eagerly. 

When she kisses his head, it’s the affection Thomas depraves him of. When her lips pop kisses to his cheeks and nose, it tickles and he laughs. When she kisses him on the lips, he feels uncomfortable. Scared. He  _ trusted  _ her. 

She touches him. Violates him. Wade doesn’t know any better until years later, when the damage is done. 

From childhood, life fucks Wade Wilson up. As a young boy, defenceless and abandoned by those who should have protected him, he lies in bed hidden under the covers wishing for someone or something to save him. 

No savior comes. 

Thomas parents with an iron fist and Wade grows up rebeling. Acting out gets him beaten with a belt and when he’s an adult, the sound of leather cutting through the air will still cause him to shudder. 

Wade is nine when the school calls Thomas about his inability to pay attention. They suggest he see the school counselor. Thomas declines, because when he was a child you swept your feelings under the rug. Problems weren’t meant to be aired out on the front lawn for all to see. The drive home is tense, silent. Wade suffocates in apprehension. 

The truck door shuts with a bang and Thomas drags Wade inside their house by his skinny arm. He hauls Wade off the floor like he weighs nothing, slams him into the wall with a force that makes his bones rattle. Wade stutters out an explanation, tears coursing down his cheeks. Thomas leaves him a crumpled heap in his room. 

Later, alone and nursing a bottle of gin, Thomas will regret his harshness. He will reflect back on his own turbulent and neglectful adolescence. Remember being left in his parents cream colored Mercury Meteor in a bar parking lot, huddled in the back seat waiting for his mother and father to stumble out reeking of booze and smoke. 

He wonders how his life came to this. In his youth, sweeter than his bitter present, he traveled abroad and met a radiant, sun kissed girl. Her laugh made his heart swell and after a month they married. She came home with him to Canada and wilted in the new environment, her roots rejecting the frozen soil. She languished. He grew resentful. 

Wade was born and things were better, for a while. 

Hailey died. 

Thomas never thought he would become his own father, who beat him within an inch of his life on bad days. 

Thomas has the chance to break the cycle, the chance to set aside his pride and do right by his son whose only crime is being slower than his peers. 

Thomas tosses back another burning gulp of gin. He survived his own childhood. Wade will survive his and it will make him stronger. 

* * *

Wade is fourteen when he seriously considers killing himself. He goes over his options methodically, planning his death when he should be listening to his math teacher. There’s a gun locked in his father's room, and it seems to be the most obvious choice. 

He contemplates for weeks, gathering his courage, and decides dying is the best way to end his misery. Thomas isn’t home, a blessed reprieve, and Wade picks the lock to the mans bedroom door. A talent learned from the local thugs he runs with. 

The browning 9-mm pistol is the gun Thomas taught him to shoot with. Afternoons in the woods aiming for long necked bottles, murky glass shattering with each successful shot. Thomas’s hand on his shoulder, a rare expression of pride on his usually stoic face. 

It is the gun he will end his life with. 

Wade grips the cool metal, heavy in his shaking hand. The effort to raise his arm, to bend it so the muzzle kisses his temple, is herculean. His finger feels stiff. The trigger clicks. 

Nothing happens. 

The weapon thuds to the carpeted floor and Wade crashes to his hands and knees, gasping, trembling. 

It isn’t loaded. He checks to make sure, and the chamber is indeed empty. Adrenalin courses through his veins and Wade shoves the handgun back where his found it, trips as he flees the room. 

He doesn’t try to kill himself again until he’s seventeen. 

His second attempt is, somewhat, less foolhardy. A friend of a friend procures the drugs, doesn’t ask questions because money is money. 

Wade lines the chalky blue tablets in neat rows on his desk. Diazepam, valium. Made to ease anxiety and relax the body. And when taken in high doses, mixed with alcohol, it’s lethal.

Two rows of ten sky blue tablets stare back at Wade. He takes them two at a time, knocking them down with sips of water. He takes a ragged breath, wipes his mouth and reaches for the stolen bottle of gin from his father's liquor cabinet. The taste makes him gag. 

He fights the urge to vomit, because picking the pills out of his stomach bile and taking them again isn’t something he wants to do. It takes an hour of sipping at the gin for his limbs to start feeling heavy and his eyelids droop.

_ This is it _ , he thinks. He thought the revelation would be a comfort, but instinct is a thing hard to deny. Panic seizes him and his body fights even though his brain has given up. It feels like he’s moving through water as he crawls towards his bedroom door, locked to minimize the temptation to back out. 

The temptation he is now giving into. He goes limp reaching for the knob. 

* * *

He wakes up with a splitting headache. Anger and disappointment are the first things he feels once the agony in his head subsides. The next thing he feels is confusion. 

“How,” he shouts at the ceiling, yanks his hair. 

The answer, as he’d figure out, was fake pills and alcohol poisoning. 

Wade can’t believe his luck. 

* * *

He proves to be much better at killing other people than he is at killing himself. 

Shooting Thomas is surreal. Blackness consumes him, broken by the sound of a gunshot. He returns to awareness to see Thomas in a puddle of his own blood, dead. 

Wade leaves the country. 

He meets a girl, knock out beautiful and as perverted as he is. Their love is meant to be. Two damaged souls who complete one another. They share a loft, they share their lives.

Life is finally starting to look up. 

He collapses. A doctor diagnoses him with terminal cancer. 

What he does, he does for Vanessa. To spare her, to ensure she doesn’t have to suffer losing him. 

He lives, disfigured and mentally broken. He comes back to her too late. She can’t forgive him. Can’t forget the pain he caused her by disappearing. 

Wade swallows a bullet and wakes up the next morning to the buzz of White and Yellow. Suicide, is seems, is no longer an option. He tries booze and drugs to dull the pain of his endless existence, but his healing factor means getting high is a feat not easily achieved. The loneliness is crippling and Yellow chiming that he’s never alone is not a comfort. 

But he can’t die and life is ever moving onward. He meets a young superhero who saves him in every way possible. Peter makes him stop wishing he could stay dead. 

After six months they move in together. Wade honestly didn’t think they’d get this far. Good things tend to avoid him, and Peter is the best thing to ever happen to him--to  _ anyone _ . But the boy seems determined to stay with him no matter what, although this does little to help Wade’s non-existent self-esteem. He almost wishes Peter would leave him, find someone better. Someone who didn’t hear voices and have conversations with them. Someone who didn’t act batshit crazy. 

He wonders if this is all an elaborate simulation, some kind of trick his mind is playing on him. 

Wade wakes up early one morning to find himself alone in the bed. His brain immediately jumps to the conclusion that this is the end of the illusion. The phantom Peter is gone, had never been. He had been waiting, subconsciously, for this moment since the first time they slept together. Tentative hopefulness had crept up on him the next morning, when Peter was still in his bed. 

Now it’s over. Months of time had seemed to pass, but as he looks around he doesn’t see their bedroom. He only sees his water damaged walls, green streaks of mold seeping through the plaster. An emptiness opens in his chest, a gaping hole that Peter had filled. 

His boxes titter, lamenting the loss and blaming him for his stupidity. For believing someone like Peter could love him. Wade gropes in the darkness for the gun always kept within grabbing distance. Pressing it to his head is an automatic action, one repeated many times throughout his immortal life.

Soft light spills into the room from the hallway and there his ghost is, a Peter-shaped silhouette in the doorway. The illusion freezes, and its voice is painfully accurate. 

“Wade?” 

The bang of the gun keeps Wade from hearing more. 

* * *

Wade comes to with a kind headache he hadn’t had in a while. A ‘shot in the head kind of headache.’ A groan rumbles in his chest as he sits up, blinking against the sunlight shining in through the window. He absentmindedly touches the back of his head. The sheets are clean, not sticky with blood and brain matter. 

What happened last night? 

He shuffles to the bathroom, startling when he opens the door and sees Peter, covered in blood and wearing nothing but underwear in the tub. His skin looks pale against smears of red. 

“Peter!” Wade’s heart drops. Peter was hurt. Peter could be dying. Oh god what happened? He paws at his lover, frantically trying to find the source of the blood. He finds none. 

Hollow eyes look at him unseeingly. 

“Peter? Peter, talk to me baby. Tell me what’s going on.” 

Peter’s cold to touch and Wade is on the verge of a full blown panic attack. 

Finally, a small, monotone voice answers his questions.

“Why, Wade?” 

“Why what, baby boy?” 

Dull eyes swing to him. “Why did you kill yourself?” The blankness of his face cracks. He cries, sobbing, ugly crying. “Fuck you’re such an ass! Why would you do that?” He says shrilly, and then he quiets. Curls into himself and tries to stifle the sounds of his weeping. Peter is physically smaller than Wade, shorter and slimmer, built with lean muscle. Peter can lift a bus, he’s not fragile. But in this moment he looks so small. 

The knobs of his cervical vertebrae jut out and he can see the line of Peter’s spine. His eyes are red and puffy and it’s Wade’s fault. 

“What am I doing wrong?” Those doe eyes look up at him, pleading for an answer. 

Wade’s heart breaks. 

“God, fuck, baby boy. Don’t do that. You didn’t do anything wrong. Don’t say that. You’re perfect.” Wade kneels, bent over the lip of the tub to grasp Peter’s hands. “I’m so sorry. Peter, I am so  _ so  _ sorry.”

“I can’t do that again, Wade. I can’t keep doing this.” Before Wade can misconstrue this as a breakup, plan to find a nice hotel to blow his brains out in, Peter continues. “You can’t do this to yourself, to me.” 

Wade is silent for a moment. “I know,” he says eventually. “I know.” 

Peter stares straight ahead at the yellowing shower tiles. “I used to find you in your apartment, too.” 

“What?” 

Peter refuses to look at him. “Before we were dating. We used to hang out at your place, eat tacos, play video games. Every Tuesday.”

“I remember,” Wade says, not understanding. 

“Well, sometimes I’d come over on other days, to see if you wanted to hang out. Most of the time that was fine.” Peter takes a ragged breath, as if telling this story pains him. “A few times, though, I came over and found you in your arm chair.”

“Sleeping?” He asks hopefully. 

“Dead. Blood everywhere, your gun in your hand.” He turns, teary gaze locking with Wade’s. “I’d always come back later.”

“With take out.” Wade realizes aloud. “And movies.” 

Peter nods. 

“I’m sorry,” he says again, although he could say it a million times and it would never be enough. 

“Please, Wade. I don’t think I can handle coming home to find you dead.” That he has seen too much death in his life already goes unspoken. 

Promises aren’t Wade’s style. He doesn’t like commitments or obligations, but Peter is his ultimate commitment. The only one he’s ever been willing to make. 

“Okay, okay. I promise.” It’s a promise he intends to keep, but one he will probably break. “Let’s get you cleaned up.” He runs the water to a temperature that is slightly too hot for him, but just right for Peter. He pulls up the spigot and the stray hits his beloved. 

Wade climbs in and lifts Peter to his feet, scrubs the blood from his skin. Pink water swirls down the rust rimmed drain. 

It’s hard to tell if Peter forgives him. No more words are shared about the event that day. 

The silence stretches between them, a distance that was never there before. Wade had, from the moment he met Peter, felt close to him. There was a connection between them; and now there is a rift. 

“Why did you kill yourself?” That’s what Peter had asked him. 

Wade doesn’t know how to answer that. He hasn't learned how to speak about the things that shaped him. He doesn’t know how to talk about his dead mother, or the cold lips of a troop leaders smothering his. He doesn’t know how to say that if he had tried harder years ago, he wouldn’t be alive today. 

So he says nothing. 

They go to bed that night and Peter freezes in the doorway, shaking. He turns and runs, takes refuge on the couch. 

The mess of Wade’s suicide is gone from the bedroom and Peter’s flesh, but the stench of copper remains. Soaked into the carpet. The memory is burned into Peter’s mind, the backs of his eyelids. 

They open the windows, air out the apartment. 

Wade covers Peter’s body with a blanket from the linen closet and sits at the foot of the couch. The television casts a pale light and Wade puts on a stand-up comedy special. Peter’s hand peeks out and hangs over the edge of the cushion. 

Wade holds it. 


End file.
